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This past weekend we stayed home to attend Greg’s company’s Christmas party, visit with the Stielers and Co. and finish our Christmas shopping. On Friday night for the party we went to a new steakhouse in Marquette called Elizabeth’s Chop House. It’s a high-class joint with excellent food (don’t forget your checkbook). On Saturday we finished 95% of our holiday shopping and decided to buy our joint gift as usual. Instead of buying each other gifts (we can never figure out what to get each other), we buy one gift together that we both want. This year was a little more exciting as it was an iPod Nano. Last year was a car starter and the year before was a snowblower. On Saturday night we visited with Greg’s relatives in Skandia and Leah had fun playing firemen with them. Sunday was more of a relaxation day and we did pretty much nothing but watch football.

Hard to believe Christmas is only a week away…

I can’t believe that it’s almost Christmas. Greg and I are still way behind on the gift buying because I keep thinking that we have weeks yet to finish up, but we don’t. Next Friday we head downstate for the fun, old-fashioned Kretovic family Christmas. Speaking of that, we haven’t watched our usual National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation yet. And if you didn’t catch that reference (lame though it was) you need to watch it, too. We haven’t seen A Christmas Story yet, either, and we’ll miss the 24 hours of it on TNT, so we’ll have to watch it some other way. See all of the stuff we have left to do? When will we find time to watch two movies?

Last weekend we went down to Appleton to do some of our shopping and visit Scott, Theresa, Lily and our goddaughter, Chloe. It was fun, the mall was crazy and Chloe doesn’t like Greg. He would ask her, “Chloe, do you want to come sit by me?” And she would just give him this LOOK and say, “No!” It was funny.

At least this year feels more like Christmas, with the snow and all. I was reading our post from after last Christmas, when we still didn’t have any. [As a side note, Greg was just telling me that in the Duluth area tomorrow the wind chill is supposed to be -50. That's just one more reason that I'm glad to be back in the UP. I can handle the snow way better than the cold.]

Tomorrow night is Greg’s company’s Christmas party, which is at a new steak place in Marquette. Yum. I’m going to order an extra big steak so I can take the leftovers home with me. It should be fun! Here are a few pictures from last weekend:

Chloe smiling (she must not have seen Greg yet)

Theresa, Lily and Greg playing Twister, one of our gifts to Lily

Yesterday ended another pet era in our lives. I had put some flyers up, in Munising, that mentioned that we needed to get rid of Buns. Needless to say, we had a taker last week and we made the delivery on Sunday. She’s going to see how it goes for the week but we think he’ll do okay. The new owner does have a 9-year-old Beagle but the dog is very mellow and they seemed to enjoy each other’s company while we were there.

This winter seems to be off to a “normal” start this year. The last few years have been pretty wimpy and this year it should be a white Christmas. We received about 8″ on Saturday night and another 3″ today. While I was out snowblowing tonight I think it snowed a 1/2″ or so in the half-hour I was out there. I’m really looking forward to the lakes freezing and doing some fishing.

With the outside temperature only being 5 degrees right now, it definitely feels and looks like winter. It has come on quick. We only have a few inches on the ground here but other parts of the U.P. have a foot or more. We’re currently in a winter storm warning for a weather system that’s suppose to hit Saturday night into Sunday. They’re saying we’re suppose to get almost a foot of new snow so we’ll see. The cold weather means the lakes will be freezing which means ice fishing will commence soon. Leah isn’t too thrilled about me talking about that because of the safety factor of the early ice.

We had a good Thanksgiving and enjoyed the time off from work. We were in Nahma this year and it was a packed house on Thursday for the turkey and the big Packer vs. Lions game. Even though the Lions lost I still won some money in the scoring pool. After Thursday’s big event everyone went home and it was a quiet weekend the rest of time. We took some pictures from the weekend and have posted them in our photo gallery section.